Contact Info

I served Board Member for the OpenStreetMap Foundation. I was elected during the 2009 election.

You can contact me if you need to talk about OpenStreetMap.

mail: simone (at) osmfoundation (dot) org

skype: simone.cortesi

Google Talk: simone (at) cortesi (dot) com

Jabber: simone (at) jabber (dot) at

IRC (@irc.oftc.net): Simone (or Simone1)

location: near Pavia, Italy

phone: by request

About GPS and me

My fascination for GPS technologies goes back to 1994 when I first heard about the constellation of satellites orbiting Earth reading the italian edition of Scientific American, I was really amazed by the idea of a "beam" coming from outer space which would let me know my own position on planet Earth. What fascinates me is the ability to convert something real as my physical presence in a given place, to a number pair representing that location.

Then, again, came in the idea of being able to "tag" objects in real world, like Neal Stephenson in its article on WIRED.

Then in 1998 I finally bought a Garmin e-map (now discontinued, which is the predecessor of eTrex Legend CX), a unit that I still own and use for wardriving. Then I did buy a Tom Tom 300 which I use with NMEAlogger, a couple of MTK I-blue 747, and a bluetooth mouse.

About OSM and me

I've been involved in OpenStreetMap since early 2005, and participated within the project since its inception. Apart from mapping my own town, I've been helping other OpenStreetMappers in the online mailing lists, IRC and forums since then.

I first heard about openstreetmap reading an NTK newsletter back in 2005. Contributed not that much to it, done some work on the comunity.

In 2008 I was one of the speakers at the annual State Of The Map conference, presenting the italian efforts in mapping our Country. My slides are available on Slideshare

I did stand for election as board member at this year OSMF elections, but was not succesfull. Still, I've granted the Foundation my will to help out on various matters and thus I'm part of the OpenStreetMap Foundation Management Team, and now I'm dealing with Local Chapters

In july 2009 presented again in Amsterdam for The State of the Map, again talking about Italy.

Data

Italian Borders

I'm the prime guilty for the import of the italian internal borders between municipalities, provinces, regions, and country, Bulk_import.pl was my friend. Additionally I convinced the public sector of these administrations to license the data to openstreetmap.

Friuli Venezia Giulia

Data were granted at the end of december 2008, still being imported.

Veneto

On 2009.01.23 the OSM community has been granted derivation right for the Regional Technical Map, imorteda data will bear this tag:

merge

osmosis --rx in1.osm --sort --rx in2.osm --sort --m --wx out.osm

merkaartor extract

In Merkaartor you can draw a way around the area of interest and save it. Then use the tool
"osm2poly" from SVN (requires the way to be tagged with polygon_id=1 and
polygon_filename=mypoly.poly or so), which will then generate a polygon
file that can be used with the Osmosis --bp task.

If you cannot open the country OSM in any editor then you could still
open your favourite editor and load a WMS (landsat) background and draw
the area on top of that, save as .osm and proceed as above.